I’m All Lost In, #78: Doom on 15th Ave. E.; new poetry from Arthur Sze; impending doom on 19th Ave. E.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#78

I’ve only done a few RIPs here—early 1960s juvie hall diva Mary Weiss; the great Jerry Feit; Rosalynn Carter; 1950s doo-wop eccentric Maurice Williams; Jimmy Carter; DIY Brooklyn rap artist, Ka; New York Dolls’ lead singer David Johansen; urban planning guru Donald Shoup; and my childhood basketball hero, Jerry West. Sadly, this week I must add another name to my (mostly) para sentimental list of losses: RIP Clem Burke, the magnificent Blondie drummer whose gigantic beats always packed the band’s sardonic new wave, disco, rock, and nod-and-wink-‘60s-girl-group-pop mix with a consistent knuckle sandwich.

Whether learning “Dreaming” or “Picture This” on piano or marveling at late-1970s masterpiece LPs such as Parallel Lines or Eat to the Beat, I wrote a lot about Blondie last year. Blondie is a favorite band from my adolescence that has emerged on the 21st Century’s list of now-revered musical pioneers who still also sound fantastic. In a June 2024 post about the first, and perhaps best, new wave album I ever bought—Eat to the Beat—I wrote this about Burke:

The star of this expert mix is Blondie’s drummer Clem Burke. Every track on Eat to the Beat, from pop dynamos like “Dreaming,” to sexy disco rock like “The Hardest Part,” to insouciant pop like “Union City Blue” is driven by Burke’s rolling tympani fills and nonstop trap kit assault.

I guess, in the end, not nonstop. Luckily, his work is preserved on record.

Onto this week’s preoccupations:

1) Where Have You Gone Bites of Bangkok?

Bites of Bangkok on 15th Ave. E., Still closed, 4/11/25

Speaking of not-nonstop. Is Bites of Bangkok’s magical run over?

Every time I walk by the striking red storefront and black awning of my neighborhood’s dive nirvana these days, I’m cast into a stream of memories: proudly rushing my out-of-town guest Gregor Samsa, aka, Lee, to this slapdash spot on 15th Ave. E. for the miracle of late night dinner in Seattle; sweeping in with a date after a groovy rock show, a little giddy and a little drunk, sitting down at a cozy table waiting—and whispering with hope, is that ours?—for two sloppy plastic takeout bags of tasty noodles, veggies, and hot soup; locking down with my friends Wendy’s Stealing Clothes, aka, Annie and suburban State Sen. Marko L. for a beautiful intra-Democratic party squabble while eating bok choy, broccoli, and tofu entrées with crispy hot eggrolls on the side; or strolling in solo to read a book at the bar while sipping a cocktail alongside the gaggle of regulars who are busy chatting with the superstar (gracious pour) bartender as a second-tier ‘90s movie plays in the background on the mounted TV.

I’m lingering over these memories because Bites of Bangkok has gone dark in 2025. The always-kind-of-a-surprise gem closed “temporarily” back in mid-January; my theory is that there was no way to replace the secret ingredient, the lazily charismatic bartender who moved to Amsterdam in January to be with his girlfriend (we all thought he was gay). According, incorrectly, to a staffer at the comedy club next door, Bangkok Bites was set to reopen a month ago now. In reality, its large darkened window has loomed over the sidewalk all year, enervating the deceptively welcoming bright red storefront and prompting the same kind of disappointed feeling you get when a tall guy takes the seat directly in front of you the moment before the movie starts.

I’ve lost count of the number of times recently I’ve thought, I’m craving a strong whiskey and an oily plate of rice and stir fried veggies, only to realize my neighborhood’s perfect choice might not exist anymore. As Bites of Bangkok’s apparently defunct Instagram account says: “We’re taking a break…we will open again on January 8th @5pm…” The lone comment frets: “When will you guys reopen? Been closed for a couple months…”

2) The Poetic Juxtapositions of Arthur Sze

How pleasantly surprised was I to find that a set of 26 new poems closes Arthur Sze’s otherwise retrospective collection, 2024’s The Glass Constellation.

Even though Sze is a woo-woo nature bard—daffodils, mesas, honey locust leaves, herons—he is one of my favorite poets. Indeed, despite my zealous commitment to cities, Sze’s go-to conceit is constantly enlightening: He rapidly strings together simultaneous events at play in the material world.

Searching for lightning petroglyphs, I stumble/ on a rattlesnake skin between rocks/—at dusk, soldiers set up machine guns/ near the entrance to the Taj.

As University of Virginia professor of creative writing Lisa Russ Spaar explains in her review of The Glass Constellation, Sze’s “signature cocktail” is his gift for mixing images:

..in the shaker that is the poem, [Sze] mix[es] exquisitely sensory (often synesthetic) detail; things occurring in the same moment but in different places…; intimate, political, violent, natural, erotic, and historic instances, perceptions… corded together; an expression of the mysteries of time, sexuality, and natural beauty that infuse human experience with meaning (“we hear / a series of ostinato notes and are not tied /to our bodies’ weight on earth”). For as with … any interrelated series or simultaneous frisson, such as a musical chord, it is the quality and specificity and arrangement of the various parts brought together — the catalogue, the list, the various notes — that make something new, fresh, inimitable about each configuration. In fact, one way to engage with Sze’s substantial new and collected poems might be to read a poem a day as a kind of koan or text upon which to meditate — such is the richness of this precise, fiercely observant, metaphysical and elegant work.

I first read Sze in 2022 when I bought his then-most-recent collection Sightlines (2019). The potential joke was on me. The title struck me as an urban planning term (it also sounds like the name of a local housing density and sustainability think tank I admire). Rather than being thrown by what turned out to be Sze’s lingering nature walk poems, I was instead blown away by the flashcard series of precise and transcendent observations he effortlessly presented:

A neighbor hears gunshots in the bosque/and wonders who’s firing at close range;/I spot bear prints near the Pojoaque River/but see no sign of the reported mountain lion.

Or, and as is often the case, more dramatically in his closing stanzas:

I want to live on this planet:/alive to a rabbit at a glass door—/and flower where there is no flower./ —During the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot by a firing squad—

The new poems stir this same juxtaposition chemistry, including a gorgeous six-part sequence titled appropriately enough “Entanglement” in which Sze outlines what’s up:

When you least expect it, your field/of vision tears, and an underlying landscape/reveals a radiating moment in time./Today you put aside the newspaper,/soak strawberry plants in a garden bed;/yet, standing on land, you feel the rise/and fall of a float house, how the earth/under your feet is not fixed but moves with the tide.

3) It’s Not Going to Work

In which I weigh in once again (this is an obsessions column after all) on the disappointing restaurant that just opened on my block.

We gave Rocket Taco 2.0 one more chance, taking seats at the expansive, yet nearly vacant bar top, ordering whiskeys, and trying in earnest to make a nightcap of it. Too bad for us. An indolent staffer, more a service worker than a neighborhood bartender, reluctantly gave us our drinks. They never checked in with us again. And to be fair: It’s clearly not their job to. There is seemingly no dedicated bartender position at this local bar. It’s evidently not part of the business plan.

Oblivious to the cozy potential, Rocket Taco’s owners do not not seem up to the opportunity of moving into this elegant neighborhood space on 19th Ave. E. For starters, despite the capacious moody restaurant digs, patrons are greeted at the door with a cash register queue where they’re made to order and pay in advance—checking in to check out, rather than being seated and encouraged to stay for a flowing evening of table service and kismet.

My prediction: despite some chatty, initial crowds (loose usage), these diners are not going to return. In sync with the fast food check-in parameters, the staff botches any dining-out mood as they eagerly get busy mopping the floor, unplugging the music—with a loud electronic fart the night we were there, and putting up chairs at the too many conspicuously unoccupied tables as the egregiously early 8:30 clean up time kicks in.

Nothing about the interior design choices say stay and make memories here this evening. In fact, there are no evident interior design choices to speak of other than the prominently displayed stack of to-go boxes at the bussing station by the front door. No art. No plants. And, give it a month, likely not enough customers.

——–

What would this weekly report be without a tennis update? And this one’s important: On Saturday morning, I hit my first-ever two-handed backhand, smashing a crosscourt winner past Valium Tom as he rushed the net. I’ve always used a one-handed backhand, but possessed by impulse, my inner Monica Seles seized the opportunity for not only a two-handed return, but one with a satisfying, skidding bounce into the open court.